Posted
by
Hemos
on Thursday September 14, 2000 @06:51AM
from the coming-soon-to-a-theater-near-you dept.

bob|hm was one of the group of people who wrote to us with an update from Kuro5hin. The donated server from VA has been packaged and sent out - now it's a matter of hooking it back up and "kicking the tires."

No you have gotten me mad enough to post what I wanna say (even if you were spouting flamebait).

This IS news for nerds and it certainly matters.

This a politcal economic movement of the sort we could be orgainsing vis-a-vis DeCSS or the MPAA (picket the goods coming into the area and leaving distribution points).

We don't argue that a scientific story counts as News for Nerds but we argue wether this does...give me a break. How long are our oil reserves going to last, who is using it up, what can we do to prolong it and what is going to replace it?

The UK does NOT need to lower its taxation, the US need to be told to grow up and join the rest of the world in ensuring that petrol etc. are expensive commodities. If you guys want to drive 5 litre cars at $1.65/gallon of petrol fire ahead, just don't wine when you kid/grandkid never even sees a petrol based engine run. I would prefer that the US took the extra $3 / gallon and used it on developing an acceptable alternate to ween all the petrol guzzlers away from polluting the environment and wasting precious natural resources.

When K5 went down a lot of people came to my cube here at work and were just apoplectic. I realized thier downtime really wasn't hardware related, but I figuered that some nice hardware would mean that k5 would be able to avoid certain performance issues endemic with fast growing sites. And they are well liked here in sunnyvale.

Also, while k5's issue were ddos related, having the extra processing power could mean the difference next time in setting up cpu intensive network rules.

I've been thinking about this, and I have a lot to say about this and not alot of time right now, find me at ALS or something and we can chit chat about it.

The argument that VA will continue to be very good to the developer community and sites like k5 because of the profit motive can definately made and I can make it, but luckily that's only part of why we do it, we also feel that to not do it would be exploitative of the very community VA employees rose out of (or have subsequently been brought into).

Of course giving out hardware and the rest has the effect of generating a lot of goodwill, which is good, and makes recruiting a lot easier, which is also good. Any company that doesn't pay attention to it's user and developer base is foolish. In OSS it's simply criminal.

That said, we're never going to please everyone, but it's working out so far pretty well.

I don't know that that really addreses what you are asking,but it;s a long discussion.

Yep, we donated a server to Jamie. He's been a good friend to us personally and to the company in general.

Now, I don't speak for rob or any of the/. people, but I think that the reason this story is being posted is not about VA so much as it is about/. having the class to tell people about the status of kuro5hin. If you look on the site, rusty all but asks for a post.

The way I see it, anyone familiar with k5 knows we helped them out, and those that aren't wouldn't read the story much anyhow, so I don't see this as corporate shillism.

As far as your worries about the sites we actually run, only time will tell. In the past we've been good (unless you talk to a few people, that is:-) and we're not looking to change. Of course time will show our intentions better than any post on/.

Every article with VA or any other thing that points to something like VA you go on a rant.

VA is needed. We run VA. They provided us with rock solid hardware that has allowed us to do what we do. They are doing the same for Kuro5hin (it is just that they get free hardware...)

This is not the place for you to whine about your problems. I am getting tired of reading your posts complaining about VA. You may have been screwed over by them. Move on. Go make some more pretty backgrounds and please, for all of us, stop the bitching and moaning.

One amusing tidbit that I found while perusing the source for the Kuro5hin home page [kuro5hin.org] was this:

<!-- <p>On a side note, I'll prepare a list of the sites involved in the initial attack who have not been helpful in finding information about the attacker. Expect to see it within a few weeks.</p> -->

It would be nice to know where this abuse originated, and who was most interested in protecting them. A nice LARTing is definitely in order.

Maybe not, but it's not your place to judge. If you don't like it, you can feel free to leave. That doesn't mean you should posting offtopic messages.

---
Aaaah, my mistake - you must be American!
Obviously, with your retarded attention span, you must be riveted with the action gong on here!
---

Ah, yes. And you say they bred tact out of Americans, right? The nationalism you're exhibiting reaks with the stench of 2 month old eggs.

Lucky for we 'retarded' Americans, most British folk are quite pleasant. It would appear you are the exception, not the rule. Unfortunately, all it takes is one big mouth to create an unfair stereotype about the British.

Oh, sure. Typical of the so-called "Open Source" community, that as soon as someone tries to make a living from their hard work, someone else has to come along and yell "sell out"! Y'know, it's people like you and that commie RMS that are going to put a lot of hard-working programmers out on the street, not to mention all those poor struggling rock stars that you are no doubt stealing music from. Sure, if I'm a sellout, than I suppose that Lars Ulrich and the other artists from the musical group Metallica are also sell-outs, just because they don't want you to steal their hard-earned labor? Well fine then.

Perhaps you'd like to leave us to our own devices? The UK is a *very* different country to the US - just because petrol prices are cheap over there doesn't mean they should be over here. We can do just fine working this out by ourselves without being interfered with by those who know nothing about our situation.

I *know* this is meant to be a parody, but at the same time is it any sillier as a concept than alternative keyboard layouts?

Its entirely possible that you could indeed make English phoentics and the English alphabet a little more coherent and logical. It might be simpler to replace some of the letters of the alphabet with new glyphs. The 'eff' sound, as in 'f'ish and 'ph'oentics, could be represented with a new glyph.

Anyway, I enjoyed reading it but I must be braindead yet this morning because it kind of makes sense to me!

Funny but I bet the problems that kuro5hin had will bring them even more traffic then they had before. I mean, I never once went to that site before but now that I saw so much things about it here I can't wait it to be back to see what it looks like and how cool it is. I bet I'm not the only one...

I am NOT associated with AlterSlash, I have only found it useful. As for your implicaction that this is "Ripping Off" their content,/. itself used to list quite a few pages that "Rip Off" its content on the FAQ page. Many of these are aimed at providing more readable content for handheld devices.

If they got mad at this guy, they'ld have to get mad at everyone else that displays their headlines...

wierd but maybe its true. As the saying goes their is no such thing as bad advertising. K5 just got a ton of that. In addition they got some ass kicking servers, and a chance to take a long hard look at how they do things. Arguably none of this would have happened if it were not for some l33t kiddy. Strange yes? I liked K5 a lot, but now it has gotten a ton of exposure which can only make it better.

Errrrr...
What?
I'm not sure I understand;
VA owns Andover! Which of them buys/co-opts/helps out Kuro5hin is kinda immaterial...

Anyway, having said that, VA are 'helping out' a lot of the 'open-source in crowd' with hardware etc; They seem to own:

Linux.com

Slashdot.org

Freshmeat.net

Etc, the whole 'OSDN'...
And they've donated hardware far and wide - jwz's DNA Lounge is running on (donated? not sure) VA hardware, And now Kuro5hin.

Anyway, I guess this is how the corporate world works. We're just lucky at this point that VA is such a nice company, but it still troubles me that so much of our cool stuff relies on a publically owned, money-driven organisation.

I think this is a very interesting issue - whether a company is primarily those who work for it, or some other beast entirely different from any of its individual parts.

The (thanks Cryptonomicon) mantra 'do my actions increase shareholder value?' is a mercenary idea. So to look at VA from a purely Darwinistic angle, we could say that all of its altruistic actions are performed solely to generate venture capital/revenue. To do otherwise would be irresponsible management, and betrayal of the shareholders. So, in this view, VA's wishes and those of the 'tribe', 'community', whatever, coincide only by chance.

But, of course, this view is hard to stick to once you remind yourself that companies are just groups of people. And all the people that I know of who work for VA are great - I'd entirely trust them all to run the community's stuff.

So where do these two views meet? I don't really have much experience working for corporations, so I'd be interested to get some ideas from people who do!

The K5 guys do a great job and are only getting a hand from some guys that enjoy what they do. I've seen your crap you call art (themes) and I can do without it and the filth you spew here on this site. If you don't have anything nice to say at least try to say it with out cursing and giving the sexual enuendos that you apparently enjoy. When you post these you identify yourself as nothing more than a 12 year old rant fiend.

I would like to be the first to congratulate Mr. Poag on his wonderful choice of action. It seems to me that he could have done either of two things:

Offer friendly advice and counsel to K5 on the "dangers" of working with VA Linux, from the position of someone who has been in K5's position on the receiving end of something that did not turn out to be the altruistic gift it appeared to be.

Or, he could whine about his mistreatment and "punish" K5 by removing his link to them. (Which, in the long run, is going to be meaningless in the light of the publicity K5 has received thanks to this/. article.)

Well, it takes a lot of courage to give up on a member of your community and move on. It's nice to know that Mr. Poag has that courage.

On a more general topic, I find the cutthroat bitterness some members of the Linux/BSD communities exhibit toward other members to be simultaneously amusing and depressing: amusing because it often leads to humorously juvenile posts, and depressing because these communities are supposed to be "better" than mainstream press -- yet there is just as much bitter infighting as anywhere.

i didn't say 'don't put this on' i said 'why is it here? i don't want to see this and i believe most readers don't either'... it is called constructive criticism in the hopes that the site will benefit from it.

i used to try to get jon katz removed too, but i gave up on that a long time ago. besides which i e-mailed back and forth with him, and while his articles may often be trite and silly.. he's a nice guy and much more intelligent in one-on-one conversation. kinda bizarre.

in any case,.. your personal attacks on me have no ground to stand on so i won't bother addressing them any more than that, and as far as american politics go, you can ignore them just by filtering out that single topic. if you bothered to read my post you'd have seen i suggested maybe giving kuro5hin its own topic so people can ignore it.

the purpose of my post, as i said before, was to try to improve the site. whether you agree or not is up to you, i really don't care.
...dave

What i think is truly funny, is that you proseltize about the supposed loss of virginity surrounding K5, bitch about the corporate structure of VA Linux, announe to the world that you're removing the k5 link from your long forgotten site, which incidently, has a link to ZDnet?

Yes, the ducks of your politics are well lined up. Thank you for your input, here's your tinfoil hat, please go back to your room now and take your meds.

And I suppose classical music is crap because it was written by poor ol' Bach, Bethoven, and the other great support-contract musicians of the middle-ages rather than after they signed rights to some big record giant?

You used to get it, man! Then k5 went down, and you got a job. And that haircut (it's so evil). And you stopped smoking pot and doing the heroin. You've changed, man!

I don't even know who you are anymore. I'm porting Scoop to PHP. You're dead to me now.--

VA Linux gave us a server. If we hadn't been given the server, we'd have had to frickin' wait for about 10 years before banner ads paid for something more powerful than our old PPro! There's no control there, just a donation.

Oh well.. your comment is a good laugh. Hopefully someone will properly rate it as funny:-)--

Actually, the truckers do pay a whopping great extra on their road tax. If you want to get really pissed off, ride a motorbike - Transport & Road Research Lab reports that motorbikes hardly damage roads at all, yet the road tax doesn't reflect this at all...

However, I respectfully disagree with the idea that Slashdot is the correct forum for alerting us to this protest.
Hmm, you want to tell Katz that? Or maybe I didn't include enough psychopolitical babble in the post for you....

Slashcode is free.
It is, well noted. You may also have used your awesome powers of observation to note it is written in Perl. I would no more consider touching Perl code than I would shampoo your crotch. Actually, I'm not sure which makes me feel more ill...

If you care about it that much, how's about starting a Slashdot clone that focuses on internet protests?
Umm, because I live in the UK, where bandwidth and server space costs so much, it's not economically feasible. But that's a seperate rant, so I'll leave it be.

In any case, I'm not trying to pick a fight
Hmm, maybe it's a cultural thing, but extending an invitation to shampoo your smellies isn't exactly the right way to invite informed discussion, but an excellent way to provoke hostility. Tact, remember? Oh yeah, I forgot they bred it out of the USian race long ago...

I think Slashdot's the wrong place for your story
So, how come Katz gets so much column space, then?

I want to be an American!!!
I want to live in a country where over 50% of the populace is clinically obese!!!
I want to live in a country where I can be shot in the street for my Nike trainers!!!
I want to live in a country where I pay health insurance, or get left to bleed to death on the pavement!!!
I want to live in a country where there are only 2 political parties but it's a "democracy"!!!
I want to live in a country where literacy is lower than that of Cuba.

You're in luck, considering the 'shortage' of jobs in the IT field. Perhaps you can come work for minimum wage and visit a dentist?
Yes, yes, yes!!! I have appalling teeth! They stick out every which way, and they are blackened from neglect!!! I talk with a lisp because I cannot form wordshapes with my mouth without impaling my lips!!!

The obesity is a result of people having the economic resources to buy food. I know America would be much better off if we were all skinny and starving, but oh well, that's the way it goes.
And there was me thinking it was a complete and utter lack of self control... Hey, this is educational!!!

Nice stereotype propogated by gun-control-lobbying politicians. Unless you are in the ghetto, I wouldn't worry about it. But then again, I suppose your country is without those, right?
Actually, it is mostly free of ghettos. If in the few ghetto areas, you might get beaten up for them, but they sure as hell won't fire a gun at you...

You'd actually retain a bit more credibility if you'd bother to login, you know...

This guy gives Brits a bad reputation.
Possibly... But I have to say, USians haven't exactly acquitted themselves brilliantly over this discussion, either. And at least I have the balls to post under my uid...

Hey, Vastly Overweight, come on over!!!
You'll love it. You get to say "gee, ain't that quaint, Martha!!!" at every building in London!
You'll be able to clog our tube system with your lardy arse, scarf down as many big macs as your bloated stomach can handle whilst bitching about the cuisine, and whine incessantly about the weather!
And I'm sure with a redneck accent like yours, I can find you a good job cleaning the streets.
Book your plane ticket today!!! What are you waiting for?
Oops, silly me, forgot directions... North West Europe, you'll need to take an aeroplane - they do go past US borders, and no, you won't fall off the edge of the Earth! And yes, we _do_ have runways (and the most planes landing / hour at Heathrow, the fourth largest economy in the world... And chips with curry sauce... Mmmmm.)
Ever wonder why USA never has "Great" prepended like Britain? Go check the mirror!!!

Because VA Linux gave them a nice box. At the time, I was well impressed. It was a nice gesture.
But this constant banging on about kuro5hin seems to be an attempt to get people to go to the site, and get more eyeballs for VA Linux's generosity. There is nothing there to see, really, other than "it's taking a bit more time than we thought"
Hmm, I'm not normally a conspiracy theorist, but this smacks of either a slow news day (which it isn't, check my story submission here [slashdot.org] which was in a queue of 416 at the time of posting), or VA Linux is trying to milk all the publicity as it can. I really hope I'm wrong.

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.

Umm, because I live in the UK, where bandwidth and server space costs so much, it's not economically feasible. But that's a seperate rant, so I'll leave it be.
Bullshit. There's absolutely nothing (except laziness - which is also evidenced by your refusal to touch perl) stopping you from finding a hosting company off of British shores that's cheaper than what you can find onshore.

Hmm, maybe it's a cultural thing, but extending an invitation to shampoo your smellies isn't exactly the right way to invite informed discussion, but an excellent way to provoke hostility. Tact, remember? Oh yeah, I forgot they bred it out of the USian race long ago...
One, it's a reference to As Good As It Gets, as malahoo already mentioned; not something meant to be taken seriously. As for the "USian race having tact bred out", keep in mind that it was your King's refusal to provide representatives in your legislature that caused the US to exist in the first place - so stop bitching about Americans not having tact.

Hrmm man, you do great art, but sometimes your posts strike me as a little nuts (also outspoken, which I normally like, except when it's nuts.) I agree with you that slashdot has gone downhill, and I share your frustration with some of the things that happen here. But... well, read on, and no offense is intended, but this has to be said.

Maybe you can explain why accepting a donated VALinux box makes K5 such a sellout that you feel compelled to denounce them and delink them, yet you are making this announcement on slashot which is actually owned by Andover? How much sense does that make?

Not to mention that your site is being hosted at the newly renamed ibiblio.org, running on money from RedHat themselves! Doesn't that make your post just a little hypocritical man? I mean, really, as long as RedHat doesn't try to influence your content, why should you be anything but thankful that they are underwriting your host? You shouldn't be... any more than the K5 team should have turned down VAs generous donation that helped them get up and running again...

Until the day I die I will never understand people like you. You claim the story is unimportant and isn't news for nerds but probably spent at least 10 minutes of your time composing a post just to tell us this instead of ignoring the story. I'll leave you with two axioms my mom used to tell me If you have nothing good to say then don't say anything and It is better to keep silent and people think you are a fool than to open your mouth and confirm their suspicions.

Now about why kuro5hin is news for nerds. It is a much geek news site than slashdot which is easily witnessed by the fact that I have seen slashdot's own authers (e.g. micheal) post more on kuro5hin than I have on slashdot. Here are just a few of the reasons why kuro5hin is much preferrable to slashdot.

Everybody in the community has moderator access

all the time and thus everyone moderates posts so there is less chance of the moderator abuse that is now so frequent on slashdot. The score of a post then accurately reflects what the community as a whole feels about it.

Stories were voted on by members of the community before being placed on the front page, so

slanderous [slashdot.org], unresearched [slashdot.org], and flamebait [slashdot.org] articles never made it to the front page because they were voted down by the community.

Troll posts were deleted by the admins so there was no incentive for Penis Birds and other such spam to exist on kuro5hin.

The writeup on most articles was much higher in both quality and quantity primarily due to the fact that story authors realized that the stories would get voted down if they were not.

PS: That said, I read both sites several times a day and have nothing against slashdot but simply feel that kuro5hin was/is of superior quality.

You know, I usually enjoy your harsh yet witty criticisms, but this time you've made quite the ass of yourself. Complaining about what gets posted to Slashdot is one of the oldest, most tiring cliches. Coming from someone who can fomulate intelligent arguements, it almost seemed like a trolling attempt. At any rate, you may want to check the edition of your dictionary, because several places (Here [dictionary.com] and here [notredame.ac.jp] ) seem to think "unconstructive" is a word.

I kind of agree with you. K5 had a lot of good stories and I checked there a couple times a day but every once in a while there'd be some rant from some punk kid whining about how his high school teachers are so mean or some other such piddling tripe, and it would get posted as a story. There's one argument against the kind of moderation they had.

The "internet enabled protest" angle of your submission is a point well taken. However, I respectfully disagree with the idea that Slashdot is the correct forum for alerting us to this protest. This is not to belittle the gas problem; I just don't think that every internet protest that pops up suddenly gets a Slashdot headline by default.

Slashcode is free. If you care about it that much, how's about starting a Slashdot clone that focuses on internet protests?

"People who speak in metaphors can shampoo my crotch": one of Jack Nicholson's lines in As Good as it Gets, I think it's rather brilliant. Not that I'd reasonably expect anyone to catch on to that.... if it bothered you that much please let me first apologize, and second, extend to you an invitation to shampoo my crotch.

In any case, I'm not trying to pick a fight. I think Slashdot's the wrong place for your story, and that if there no appropriate forum exists, somebody should start one.

Kuro5hin was my second favorite "unbiased" news site next to Slashdot. CNN sucks (but only twice a day), MSNBC sucks Bill Gates' dog, CNET sucks less, Salon doesn't suck yet, and ZDNet sucks galaxies through a soda straw. Can't wait for Kuro5hin to come back on the stream and return to counteracting some of the mass suckage out here.

Gotta love certain factions of the Slashdot community. Now they're bashing VA for donating a server to the community. Of course, if VA didn't help out, they'd probably complain that VA wasn't "giving back to the community".

Considering that Kuro5hin is TOTALLY community-driven, it's particularly sellout-proof. I mean, shit... even if Inoshiro and Rusty become the biggest Microsoft whores on the planet, as long as the stories on their site continue to be submitted and selected by their readers, the site's not going to suffer one iota. It's not like Slashdot, where stories are selected by a small editorial staff that could conceivably (not saying they are, but...) be biased.

I think it is. I like K5 alot, but it's been out of action for so long now I've stopped checking their page to see if anything's up. If Slashdot didn't keep me informed, I probably wouldn't find out that it was back for quite a while. So yes, to me this is newsworthy.

Can someone tell me why a new server was needed? I would have thought whatever had to be done software-wise to block the spam could have been done on whatever they had before. Or does the processing power necessary for the new software require a more powerful machine?

I want to lie awake at night in my country house listening to vans full of yobbos park and then check my doors and windows, knowing that if I defend my home I'll be jailed while they're characterized as "loveable rogues"!

I want to be issued an identity card which I must present to anyone in authority on demand. Of course, they won't call it an 'internal passport,' but a rose by any other name...

I want everyone in town forced to have their DNA sampled any time someone in the general area commits a crime!

I want to have my health care paid for by others. Sure it's mediocre, and I have a good chance of having some bureaucrat make me wait months for treatment, but it's free (at least if you consider a system funded by an enormous tax burden 'free')! And if it's a real emergency, I can always head for the U.S., where I can get better treatment while I make disdainful comments about their evil for-profit medical system!

I want to live in a country where there is no Bill of Rights or recognized freedom of speech! I like the fact that the state can shut up those with inconvenient views!

Though I liked Kuro5hin, hearing this is why I am also quite glad that Slashdot is a lot more inclusive.

It's only temporary IIRC, after a while you'll be able to post again. Remember that/. bans an IP if it gets moderated down more than 5 times in a day, and also has things like a maximum number of posts (35 every 4 hours IIRC), so it isn't all that different, just better publicised.

Kuro5hin was a bit more bland, a bit more regular because of all the norms. People felt discouraged from all the weird id-controlled ravings, and so it lost a great deal.

It was at first, but the open submissions bin seemed to change all of that as it allowed stories to be posted that weren't perhaps "news for nerds" in a strict sense. The "Poverty in America" and "Violent Britain" stories generated some huge and interesting flamewars, and some of the best kind of discussions that weblogs produce. Unfortunately, the site was attacked just when it was getting good.

But yeah, I love the crazy crap that goes on on/. every day, and a big part of the site's "character" is the trolls, the flamers, hell even the Penis Bird Guys and Vladinators...:)

I miss kuro5hin. Whilst I get a lot of the same at/. kuro5hin had a somewhat broader focus which gave rise to some incredibly interesting discussions on things like poverty, violence and the future of software. I think the open submissions idea allowed it to be less focussed on a particular them, like/. Still, both approaches have their merits and flaws, and I love both sites.

One thing that interests me is the new "rating" system that kuro5hin will be implementing, called mojo. Like moderation and karma on/. it is designed to allow good comments to be "pushed up" and spam and other crap to be hidden from view.

The difference is that mojo is based upon the ratings given on recent posts, with more recent posts counting for more than older ones. Since everyone on k5 can rate posts, this means that people consistently posting crap will end up with a low mojo and be unable to post or submit stories.

Hopefully this system will be able to cut down on the amount of noise that weblogs like/. and k5 seem to attract, and allow k5 to get back to what it was, a growing community with loyal readers.

OK, ebbv doesn't like it and for some reason can't ignore it (3 stories in 3 months, ye gods what a flood) so no more K5 stories. Do we all get to verbottenize topics we don't like? 'Cause I'm not the biggest Linux fan in the world...

And here's a little hint for ya E; if you don't want to be seen as a troll, avoid name calling.